Not Israel's Responsibility (Extract)

By AMIEL UNGAR
Extract from an article in Issue 13, October 13, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. Ehud Olmert's anticipated departure from office in 2008 will be reminiscent of Ehud Barak's in 2001 - he will leave scorched earth behind him, just as Barak did. Outdoing Barak at Taba, Olmert has offered Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas the equivalent of 98.5% of the territory liberated in the Six-Day War and even the remaining measly one and a half percent will be compensated for by allowing a Palestinian corridor between Gaza and the West Bank, effectively bisecting the State of Israel. Moreover, according to Jacob Walles, the American consul general in Jerusalem, our capital is already on the negotiating table. Olmert retorts feebly that the negotiations over Jerusalem have not yet started. But this is mere formalism, as according to media reports the negotiations are going on via a back channel. We are being progressively pushed to the 1967 borders and the significance for Israel's enemies is clear: Going to war with Israel is a win-win situation. An Israeli defeat will result in its destruction; an Arab defeat will be transient, as sooner or later it will be possible to have another go from the identical starting lines. This suicidal policy, however, will not be the only element in the emerging sham agreement. Once the Arabs have succeeded in reversing their 1967 losses, mainly territorial, they will proceed to tackle the results of the 1948 War of Independence; mainly, the Palestinian refugee problem. Even Abbas, the so-called moderate, insists on the "right of return" to Israel. Not content with a Judenrein Palestinian state, he would have millions of Palestinian "refugees" enter sovereign Israel, thereby extinguishing its Jewish character. And why should Abbas take Israel's protestations that this issue is non-negotiable seriously? After all, Israel once insisted on secure and defensible borders radically different from the 1967 lines and the notion of a unified Jerusalem was sacrosanct. Abbas can refuse to budge, secure in the knowledge that he will retain his moderate image, while Israel's refusal to assist in its own suicide will be considered intransigence. And the delusion that one last concession will finally secure a settlement will eventually elicit Israeli "flexibility" and "creativity." The Olmert government has already agreed to a token return of refugees - 2,000 a year for ten years - recalling George Bernard Shaw's witticism that once the principle of prostitution is conceded, all that remains is to negotiate the price. Maybe Israel can achieve a breakthrough by a display of empathy for the refugees' plight as Education Minister Yuli Tamir intended by including studies of the 1948 Palestinian naqba, or disaster, in the history curriculum. Perhaps we can square the circle through some form of monetary compensation. But such acrobatics presage another Israeli negotiating collapse of the same magnitude as that on the territorial issue. Yes, the refugee issue must be addressed to secure peace, but the responsibility rests exclusively with the Palestinians and their Arab brethren, not with Israel. I once lectured before a visiting group from Germany who asked me about the refugee problem. My response was to ask them facetiously about the problem of German refugees from the Sudetenland and East Prussia, who were ejected by Czechoslovakia and Poland following the Second World War. No problem remained although the German numbers far exceeded the original Palestinian total and any call for a "German right of return" would at best attract ridicule. Contributing editor Amiel Ungar is a columnist for the Makor Rishon daily and the national religious monthly Nekuda. Extract from an article in Issue 13, October 13, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.